Thursday, July 27, 2017

Is it just me, or is our litter problem getting worse? I live on a country road in Maryland, and every day there are more plastic bottles, McDonald’s sacks, beer cans, paper napkins, and Big Gulp containers than the day before.

One of the many ways that plastic trash can affect the health and growth ofwildlife. Photo by Ian Kirk from Broadstone, Dorset, UK CC BY 2.0

Not only is the litter unsightly, it harms wildlife. One of the reasons animals get hit by cars is that they are attracted to roadsides and medians by the delicious smells of our litter. The last couple of times I’ve gone up Interstate 81, a 60- or- so-mile stretch from Hagerstown, MD, to Harrisburg, PA, I’ve noted ten or more dead birds of prey along the median - an alarmingly high number for that amount of space! The median is covered with litter, which no doubt attracts mice, which no doubt attract red-tailed hawks, which are no match for the steady stream of 18-wheelers going down the road at 65 miles per hour.

Food trash on the side of an Arkansas highway

I keep thinking about four possible explanations for all this litter. First, we are eating more and more crap from fast food restaurants and gas stations, which require plastic forks, plates, and cups, and paper napkins. We buy this unhealthy stuff, eat it in our cars, and then pitch it out the window. It makes me sad to think that most of the litter is from completely unnecessary purchases of so-called food that, for health reasons, we shouldn’t be consuming in the first place - and that we’re consuming our meals in our cars instead of at home with our families.

Second, in some places, local governments are providing fewer services, including trash collection. In our rural area, we have to pay for both trash collection and recycling, and they are expensive. Some of our neighbors choose to pay a smaller fee and haul their own trash to the dump. And some people choose to throw their trash on the side of the road: big kitchen garbage bags full of waste, television sets, tires, and all kinds of other things that cost big money to get rid of.

Third, I wonder if the increasing litter is a sign of Americans’ decreasing interest in the social contract. We don’t trust our government, we don’t like our neighbors, we feel this country isn’t giving us enough, and so we don’t mind junking up the roadways, even in our own neighborhoods. Think I’m making this up? I was talking to someone just the other day who said he never used to litter but now he does. His explanation? “I hate this #%!*ing state!”

Finally, I can’t help but think that the litter problem is related to our attenuated relationship with nature. Important books have been written in recent years about how we are spending less time in nature and how that harms us physically, emotionally, and psychologically - especially children. Perhaps people do not appreciate nature as a rich setting that we share with trees and animals and insects and depend on for clean air and water; perhaps instead people see it as empty space, a wasteland that may as well be trashed as not.

Friday, July 21, 2017

I often hear people make comments along the lines of: “Today a bird flew right into my window. Stoopid bird!” or “Stoopid ducks - why are they crossing a busy highway?”

But what’s really stupid - or maybe “silly” or “surprising” or even “horrifying” is the better word - is that we as humans have the expectation that wild birds should figure out our unnatural human world and make accommodations for it. In the last few decades, we seem to reason, wild birds should have evolved an understanding of reflective windows in houses and how dangerous they are. And they certainly should have figured out what a highway is and how to avoid it, even if it is inconveniently located between a prime nesting spot and a desired body of water.

In fact, birds make surprising accommodations to our human world and its infringement on their own. In The Bluebird Effect (one of my favorite books!), naturalist and artist Julie Zickefoose writes that in multiple incidents recorded in the U.S. and Japan, barn swallows have figured out how to open the sliding glass doors in big-box stores and warehouses. They identify the motion-activated electric eye unit and hover in front of it until the doors slide open. Then the birds quickly fly in (or out) before the doors close. Successive generations learn the technique from their parents, such that a Home Depot in Maplewood, Minnesota, has had a barn swallow colony return every year to nest inside the store since 2000!

And this article and video summarize a recent experiment by Mexican scientists seeking to explain why urban house finches have the odd behavior of stuffing discarded cigarette butts into their nests. The scientists theorize that it’s a pest-control technique: the cigarette butts ward off blood-sucking ticks that otherwise infest their nests. It turns out that nicotine has some anti-parasite properties.

Despite these happy stories, overall our human world is changing the bird world much too fast for the birds to keep up. Bird numbers are declining - alarmingly fast for some species - because we’re clearing their habitat, poisoning the insects they eat and the water they drink, interfering with their migration by putting windmills in their path and lighting up the night sky, and so on. (For more information, see the 2016 State of North America's Birds report.)

Even the clever little house finches haven’t yet caught on that those discarded cigarette butts - one of the world’s greatest sources of environmental pollution, by the way - are causing genetic damage to their chicks by interfering with cell division. But doesn’t that make us humans, the ones who throw out the cigarette butts in the first place, the stoopid ones?

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Last week I wrote of my dad's civil engineering view of nature and the growing belief over his lifetime that nature should be put in service of humans. I was thinking a great deal about his perspective during my recent month-long stay in Beijing, China, and its environs.

Over the last ten years, China has embarked on the world's largest reforestation program, spending as much as $100 billion planting trees. In case that passed by you, let me repeat it: ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS.

China has done this in response to some pretty dire environmental (and economic) concerns: desertification, soil erosion, air pollution, and runoff into waterways. But recent data shows that this effort has been useless at best and disastrous at worst. Non-native, genetically engineered, and ecologically inappropriate trees have been planted where trees previously did not exist. Monocultures of poplar and other tree species have been planted, inviting disease and insect infestation. Mixed-growth forests have been felled and plantations of "economically useful" (such as rubber) trees planted in their place.

A tree-planting program in Hebei Province, glimpsed from a bus.

What was immediately apparent to me in Beijing was the fact that tree-planting programs had been conducted in defiance of basic ecological and biodiversity approaches. I saw rows and rows and rows of one species of tree, each individual exactly the same age and size, planted exactly the same width apart, with no weeds or undergrowth allowed. One recent study showed that biodiversity actually declined when agricultural land was reforested with monoculture plantings in China: bird species took a modest hit and bee species a drastic one.

At the Temple of Heaven, imperial building styles show symmetry and clean lines.

Always thinking like a cultural anthropologist, I immediately wondered if there must be some cultural preference for this kind of planting. Vague notions of “feng shui” came to mind, something about harmony and order. I had noted the perfect symmetry and clean lines of many of the imperial buildings we visited in Beijing, such as the Temple of Heaven. They were surrounded by parks and gardens characterized by these same too-perfect plantings. I remembered feeling oppressed in such places, even as I admired their beauty, because of that carefully constructed perfection. I was also creeped out by the lack of wildlife and insects, other than magpies and a couple of other bird species that I saw again and again.

The symmetry and clean lines continue into the plantings of the Temple of Heaven park.

A bit of research suggests that my assumptions about culture were both right and wrong. Traditional Chinese gardens were, yes, very composed, but in such a way as to fill the human eye with a mixed portrait of trees, flowers, water, rocks, and buildings. Each vista was intended to provide a diverse offering of human-nature interactions brought into harmony and accord. Interaction with the West in the 19th century and beyond brought a new fashion: green grass, neat plantings of trees and flowers, and long views of lawn. It turns out those oppressive parks I saw represent a Western aesthetic taken to a Chinese extreme.

I think the monoculture tree plantings represent a syncretism: the ancient Chinese love for composing nature for human pleasure, combined with a Western love for taming nature for human control, combined with a contemporary Chinese belief in planning nature through science and technology for human benefit. The scale of Chinese planning is breathtaking. The cities in North China are running out of water, so the Chinese government is rerouting some of the Southern rivers and piping water up to the North. The desert is growing, so the Chinese government is planting acres and acres of eucalyptus trees in hopes of containing it. Beijing has a lot of smog in part because there isn't enough wind to blow it out, so the Chinese government is building tall forests that will reroute the wind to and through Beijing.I see a lot of Dad's point of view in the way that China is managing nature today. I hear echoes of my father saying, "All the big problems in the world today are engineering problems." But there is something deep within me that rejects the idea that nature can limitlessly serve humans and be addressed primarily through engineering, and I can't help but feel that China's failing reforestation efforts prove me right.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

In the last several years of his life, my father and I loved to go on car rides together. I would drive while he would point out landmarks: a creek where people used to be baptized, the location of one of the peach sheds that marked Arkansas’s long ago past as a major peach producer, a hillside thick with cedar trees indicating the presence of limestone. He knew so much about the history and the topography of southwest Arkansas, and I always learned a lot.

These car rides harkened back to many such car rides with him when I was a little girl. I loved to ride in the car, snooze on and off, and stare out the window and daydream as he told me long and (to my child’s mind) boring stories about his work life or a civil engineer’s view on the merits of asphalt versus concrete roadways. (I’ll never forget one car ride adventure, when I was around eight or nine years old. We stopped at a gas station, and I asked if I could have some money to buy some candy. “Sure,” he said and gave me a dollar. A week or so later he asked, “Where’s that dollar you owe me?” A child of the Depression for sure!)

In later years, there was something that frustrated him more and more on our rides together. He would see a brushy fencerow, or a stand of scraggly trees along the side of the road, or a weedy pasture, and shake his head in disgust. “Who would let that go to waste like that? I hate to see it!” he would complain fiercely. “I just don't know why a person or a government would allow that to happen.” That would lead into a discussion, again a civil engineer’s view of the world: rivers are meant to produce power, fields are meant to nurture crops or feed animals or grow pine trees for the local paper mills, and roadsides are meant to look neat and clean and tidy, showcasing good management of shared public property.

I look at those same scraggly places and see sources of food and cover for wildlife, fields that could grow grasses to sustain the breeding of the many grassland bird species now in rapid decline, and roadsides of bee-covered wildflowers and weeds. “But Daddy, what about the wildlife?” I would ask, knowing how much he loved birds and wildlife, too. He would grunt or answer noncommittally and move on to the next topic. I got the message: wildlife shouldn’t get in the way of progress.

Dad’s point of view made me think of centuries of rugged people in America logging forests, diverting waterways, building canals and bridges, and mowing lawns. They saw the land as something to be put to use and managed, something that would help them survive or make them grow rich. And the land and water have given us much. I’ve written previously about how we’ve also developed a preference for mowed yards and careful landscaping, a containment of nature. But it seems to me that we’re realizing now the importance of the scraggly, the unmanaged, the wild.

A few days ago I returned from spending a month in China, where I observed the manifestations of a cultural and historical context that has viewed nature as something to be organized, managed, and brought into harmony. More on that in Part 2. Hint: this photo of a tree-planting project shows neat, weed-free rows of one species of tree, with the same precisely-measured distance between each individual. I think Dad would approve!